U.S. Has Regressed to Developing Nation Status, MIT Economist Warns

The richest large economy in the world, says Peter Temin, Professor Emeritus of Economics at MIT, is coming to have an economic and political structure more like a developing nation.

We have entered a phase of regression, and one of the easiest ways to see it is in our infrastructure: our roads and bridges look more like those in Thailand or Venezuela than the Netherlands or Japan.

But it goes far deeper than that, which is why Temin uses a famous economic model created to understand developing nations to describe how far inequality has progressed in the United States.

“Collapse” by Erica Woodson.

The model is the work of West Indian economist W. Arthur Lewis, the only person of African descent to win a Nobel Prize in economics. For the first time, this model is applied with systematic precision to the U.S.

The result is profoundly disturbing.

In the Lewis model of a dual economy, much of the low-wage sector has little influence over public policy.

Check. The high-income sector will keep wages down in the other sector to provide cheap labor for its businesses.

Check. Social control is used to keep the low-wage sector from challenging the policies favored by the high-income sector. Mass incarceration – check. T

he primary goal of the richest members of the high-income sector is to lower taxes. Check.